Why You Must Stop Selling Your Time for Money

The time for money game is over. If you use your time for problem-solving and service delivery and looking after clients, you absolutely have to stop that. If I looked at your invoices and I see that you charge by the day, by the hour, or by the monthly retainer, you are in trouble.

And here's [music] why. They recently crunched the numbers on how much it costs to replace a full human year of labor, and the numbers [music] came out at $200,000, and it's only getting cheaper. See, AI runs on something called tokens, [music] and the token cost for a typical knowledge worker is less than a couple of grand for the year.

You are not going to be able to sell your value if you're 100 times more expensive. [music] But the good news is you can make a few subtle shifts and you will actually be able to transfer your value into a different format. You'll be able to break the tie [music] between selling time for money, and you'll be able to create a life that's way more fun.

In this video, we're going to talk about why it's important to build a business that scales [music] without selling time for money, and more importantly than that, we're going to talk exactly how to do it. Some of the mental frameworks that move you from time to money into getting outcomes and getting paid for those. Let's be real.

If you have a business that requires you to sit at your desk, looking at a screen, going through emails, you are absolutely selling time for money. If I look at your invoices and you are selling day rates or monthly retainers or hourly rates, you're selling time for money. Now, here's a number that should absolutely terrify you.

Recently, they crunched the data on how many AI tokens it would take to replace a full year of human labor. And I'm talking about a lawyer, a professor, a designer, an editor, anyone who's a knowledge worker who works with a screen. They went in and they looked at all these different roles and they said, "How much money would it cost in AI tokens to completely automate this role?

" And in theory, almost every role that you can do in front of a computer for an entire year is replaced with $200,000 worth of tokens. And the cost of those tokens is coming down, not going up. Whatever it is you do, if you're sitting at a computer most of the time, the value of what you do is being massively undermined by AI.

Now, this is an idea called token economics. As we go forward into this AI revolution, you are more and more in competition with the cost of tokens to do your job. So, what we need to do is we need to rethink what is it that people are really paying for you to do, and how do we repackage that in a completely different way?

So, the first thing I want to do is I want to break down really simply what is it that a business does? What are the two hard problems that every business has to solve? The two hard problems that your business has to solve is called speed to market and speed to value.

The businesses that win are the ones that master these two hard problems. Speed to value is your ability to deliver outcomes for customers. It's your ability to solve problems.

When someone buys something, they're not actually buying the process. They want a particular outcome. See, here's the funny thing.

Most of your customers, they don't actually want to spend time with you. They want to wave a magic wand and a particular result that happens. And they just currently think that you're the fastest and cheapest way to get that result done.

See, imagine you walk into an accountant's office, and the accountant says, "What are you buying from me? " And you think, "Oh, well, I'm buying your time. " They say, "Oh, fantastic.

Why don't we sit down and play Scrabble, and I'll charge you hundreds of dollars per hour to play Scrabble? " And you say, "Wait a second. I don't want to play Scrabble with you.

I want you to do my accounting. I want to make sure that I don't have any tax issues. I don't want to make sure I'm not overpaying.

" So, ultimately, an accountant's time is only producing those results that you want. So, the first thing we need to think about is that if your customers could wave a magic wand, what do they wish would actually happen? Do they want a bigger business?

Do they want more profit? Do they want to hire the right people? Do they want a better relationship?

Do they want to lose weight and have better health? You've got to figure out what is the ultimate outcome that people are trying to achieve. Now, the businesses that win are the businesses that understand this is the outcome, this is the challenge, this is the problem, and here is our approach of speed to value that is better, faster, and cheaper than anything else out there.

Now, a lot of the times, the things that you think you're in competition with could actually be the things that set you free. Recently, I spoke to a fitness trainer who was really upset about the fact that GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic have been undermining the value of a fitness trainer. And I asked the question, why don't you just package them in?

If people want to take GLP-1s to lose weight, why don't you package that into your overall offering? And ultimately, they get better speed to value. Now, the truth is people don't just want to lose weight, they also want to look great.

And looking great and losing weight, you need a combination of fitness trainer and GLP-1s. So, what that fitness trainer achieved is that by packaging in GLP-1s, their speed to value went up, not down, which means their value went up, not down. Second question is speed to market, and speed to market is about telling your story.

It's about letting people know that you can achieve this outcome. You can get this thing done. Now, I want you to imagine this.

Imagine that you get invited to go on one of the biggest podcasts in the world. What do you think that would do to your business? If you were able to tell your story to millions of people, if you could get them to understand what you do, and who you do it for, and how you do it.

If you could get them to understand how credible you are, and your case studies, and your stories, if all of that came out in the podcast, and millions of people saw it, what do you think would happen to your business? Well, what would happen is your business would probably explode. Your prices would go through the roof, and that is because being on a massive podcast would massively increase your speed to market.

It would give you lots of people who rapidly discover what you do. Provided you show up on that podcast clear and credible, your business would explode. So, ultimately, these are the only two big problems that your business has, speed to value and speed to market.

Everything else is noise. Now, what's replacing that is that instead of having to spend lots of time on all these things, you can achieve the exact same outcome with AI. AI, once trained, can answer all the questions.

It can generate the proposals. It can produce amazing, compelling content. AI can go networking for you and find the people you should be talking to, and through algorithms can amplify your message to a much wider audience if you're on certain platforms.

And also, AI can actually do a lot of the problem-solving. It can do a lot of the coding. It can do a lot of the customer success inquiries.

So, a lot of speed to value and speed to market can just be done by AI. I want you to have a new paradigm about how value gets created in the economy. And it's actually linked to an old paradigm.

Let me explain. So, in the agricultural age, most of the work was automated. Most of the value that got created in the economy was created by artificial intelligence.

We called that artificial intelligence soil. So, here's what used to happen. The farmer would come along, put a prompt into the soil, they'd plant a seed, and then the soil would do this amazing automation process.

We didn't know how it worked, but you could plant a seed and out came a bushel of wheat a few months later. So, in that situation, most of the value in the economy was automated. I want you to think about this.

In the agricultural age, the farmer's job was step one, know that it's time to plant the crops. Step two, tend to the soil and plant the seeds. Step three to step eight was the soil automating the process of growing the wheat.

Step nine was knowing that it's time to harvest the crop. And step 10 is preparing the wheat and taking it to market and selling it. Now, the farmer's job was to do step one and step two, step nine and step 10.

But from step three to step eight was fully automated by the land. Actually, we're going into an economy that looks very, very similar. Rather than having actual soil and actual land, we're going to have digital soil and digital land.

And we're going to think of that as AI. So, step one is all about knowing what to do. Step two is about setting up the technology and prompting it.

Step three to step eight is full automation AI delivering lots of value. Step nine is knowing when you're done. And step 10 is taking it to market and selling it.

I want you to think of AI as almost like a digital soil or a digital land that is doing step three to step eight. It's doing most of the work for you. And your job is to get a few things right.

So, let's talk about the five things that you actually get paid for right now. The first thing that you get paid for, I'm going to call this conviction. Conviction is where you absolutely want to see something happen in the world.

You are driven to see something happen. You are alive with it. Your life force is bubbling to see something happen in the world.

See, here's the thing. The world needs your conviction. AI doesn't have any conviction.

It will tell you anything you want to hear. Every single person who's using AI will tell you that the AI is a total sycophant. It completely lacks conviction and it's just reinforcing what you already want to hear.

What the world needs from you, step one, is conviction. We need to know what fills you with life force energy and what you want to have happen in the world. The people who are getting things done right now are the people who are very clear about their conviction.

Now, here's the thing with conviction. If you don't act upon conviction, it bubbles away. Imagine conviction as like this energy that flows around and when it hits you, you feel it and it wants you to act.

But, if you don't act, then basically the conviction says, "You know what? You don't really have conviction. I'm going to go find someone else who does.

" So, your conviction needs action, right? So, this is the stuff that you would be willing to go and act upon. The next thing you get paid for is called judgment.

Once you've got conviction, you have to have good judgment about how you're going to execute on that. It's about making good choices, having great priorities, picking a path, figuring out what questions to ask, which tools and technologies to leverage, who to bring together onto a team. Having good judgment comes from experience.

Experience typically comes from having bad judgment. So, you got to get out there in the world and you got to try stuff, right? The more mistakes you make, the more you refine your judgment and the more you end up with better judgment, which means that you get paid more.

So, conviction leads to good judgment. The next thing we need is something called taste. Taste is about making creative choices that are in alignment with what an ideal customer wants, right?

An ideal customer persona, what do they actually want? Having good taste is about creating products, services, and campaigns that really resonate with this ideal customer persona. It's a lot easier said than done, but taste comes from being in tune with the right people.

See, the people who have good taste are the people who are spending time with their marketplace. They're picking up on the energy of their ideal customers and they're able to resonate with their ideal customers. They're able to make the right choices.

Now, taste looks different for every industry. There are some industries and there are some ideal customers that want everything to be big and bright and bubbly, and there are some industries and some ideal customers that want everything to be elegant, understated, and demure. So, picking the taste that matches your ideal customer.

Taste is about making good choices that really line up with your ideal customer persona. The fourth thing that you're going to get paid for is called commercial outcomes. So, this is about making sales and delivering results.

Now, obviously, this is speed to market and speed to value. This is where the rubber hits the road. Making sales is about using tools and technology to get people from unaware and unclear to totally clear, totally trusting, totally aware.

And delivering results is where they get a great result, they get a transformation in their life, and they attribute that to you. So, if you can claim ownership and claim victory with either making sales or delivering results, you are essentially being linked to the commercial outcomes, and that's what you get paid for. And the final thing is improving the system.

So, improving the system is staying up to date with tools and technologies, always refining it, making better choices, updating the system, figuring out how do we go speed to market even faster, how do we go speed to value even faster, how do we make sure that the system spits out the right data that's accurate and that gives us insights. So, tinkering with the system to improve the system is the final thing. Now, think about it like this.

This is conviction is why do we do this? And having a great question, why are we going to do this in the first place? Judgment is what are we going to do?

Taste is who do we do this for and how do we connect with them? Commercial success is about when do we land this plane? And systems is how do we do it better?

Now, can you see the difference? We talked about time for money, where you're actually doing things. You're actually executing.

That's what the school system prepared you for. That's what all of the Industrial Revolution was about. But, this is a little bit different.

This is about decision-making. This is about taste. This is about getting results regardless of how it happens.

Unfortunately, if you don't start thinking about your business through this lens, you are going to be in competition with an unbelievably powerful system that gets better every year. And unfortunately, it's way cheaper and way faster than you could ever possibly be at doing the actual tasks. You do not want to be executing tasks.

You want to be doing these five things. So, here's the way through this. I want you to stop fighting AI.

Stop talking about how you wish the genie would go back in the bottle. I'm not in control of it, and you're not in control of it. We have to surf this wave or we get dumped by it.

Honestly, if I could go back to the '90s, I absolutely would. I loved that era, late '90s, early 2000s. I would freeze time there.

But, unfortunately, I don't have that magic wand. Like you, I'm forced into a situation where I have to adapt or get disrupted. We can either imagine that this all goes away, or we can deal with reality.

Now, the reality is this undermines our value if all we do is complete tasks. But, it amplifies our value if we focus on the right things. You are in an amazing place as an entrepreneur.

If you're watching this channel, you're an entrepreneur. You're open-minded. You're the type of person who absolutely stands to gain from this.

Here's the good news. Every industry on the planet, every business on the planet can now do things better, faster, cheaper, with more emotional benefits because of this technology. That means that everything on the planet is currently an opportunity.

In theory, all the inefficiency, all the overspend that's currently being spent in the economy is going to flood through and find new solutions. If you can be the provider of one of those new solutions, you could make a life-changing amount of money. Rather than think about how this disrupts things that is already established in the status quo, I want you to get excited.

What if you could be downstream from that disruption? What if you could be the disruption? What if you could actually have the best life you've ever had because of this technology?

It requires thinking differently, but the payoff for doing so is huge. Let me use a real-life example to make this point. I used to have an IT agency, and we used to build online assessments for people.

We used to build them on WordPress, and we used to charge 15 to 20,000. We could do about 4 to 10 of these per month if we really worked all hours. But what we recognized is that actually most of the value of what we were doing was knowing the strategy, having conviction about the strategy, having good judgment about how to execute the strategy, having the right taste for connecting with different markets.

All of that was the real value that we were offering. And what we ended up doing is coding up a platform called ScoreApp. We actually took all of our conviction, all of our judgment, all of our taste.

We focused on building a platform that did speed to value and speed to market way faster. Now, we have tens of thousands of customers who paid to subscribe to scoreapp. com.

And most of the incredible features in the system are now AI-driven. We had to make a decision one time, and the AI delivers value to all of our customers. Now, that business is worth way more than an agency could have ever been worth.

We did the same when we took the best thinking out of a publishing company and created bookmagic. ai. And then we worked with a video production company and took the best thinking out of the video production company and created video production platform.

These things used to be expensive and difficult and time-consuming to build, and now they happen in weeks, maybe months at most. And once you do this, you've got a scalable business where you never have to be selling time for money again. If you've always been selling time for money, this is unfamiliar to begin with, but I promise you, on the other side of getting this right, you are going to have a very different life.

You can live and work from anywhere, you can scale up and serve thousands of customers without it taking any of your time, and if you want to, you can use your time to build more products and more ideas and more things, or pursue a whole portfolio of other interests. I really want to see you free yourself from the time for money trap, because now is the time with these tools and these technologies and this AI stuff to absolutely do so. It's never been more possible.

You just need to be ahead of the curve and get started right away. So, here's the thing. In a post-AI world, you do have a new role to play, and that role is called being a key person of influence for your business.

It's a really important role. It's the most important role. It's probably the biggest, most elevated role that now exists.

I really want to explore this with you, and I'm running a live workshop that you can join. There'll be a link below, and we can get on a live workshop together, and we can explore your role as this key person of influence. It's where your name comes up in conversation.

It's where you build a personal brand. It's where people know you for a particular outcome, and you start spreading that far and wide. It's not about being an influencer.

It's about being known, liked, and trusted, and respected within your industry. Come and join me for a live workshop, and I will share with you exactly the strategy to go from what you know to having a lot of people who know how good you are. Click the link below, and I'll see you on the live workshop.

I hope you're enjoying these videos, and if you are, give this channel a like and a subscribe. I'll be putting out lots more videos, and I hope your business is doing really, really well.